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The future of retail applications is critical for business success

Retail applications play into three main strategies for staying competitive in the digital age.

Overview

Retailers can no longer afford to be laggards in adopting new technologies or in how software applications are implemented.

Adopting a software strategy can spur growth, shape new markets and reach new customers. Retailers have to start looking at applications as the game changer for the future by way of creating new services and offerings.

Leaders from both IT and the business must understand what it means to be a software-driven enterprise. And they must work together closely to orchestrate new business solutions to help win the digital battle and drive competitive advantage.

To win the digital battle, retailers need to fundamentally rethink how applications should be built and deployed.

The future of applications in retail: Three strategies for winning the digital battle

Background

Innovations from aggressive competitors across channels are driving lower sales and margins for some companies.

Historically, application development in retail has been large, monolithic applications designed with a specific functionality in mind (warehouse management systems, pricing, etc.). These systems are traditionally interconnected through a complex web of point-to-point interfaces. Such a non-elastic infrastructure configuration constrains retailers from responding rapidly in a dynamic, digital-physical environment.

"To win the digital battle, retailers need to fundamentally rethink how applications should be built and deployed."

Recommendations

Digital channels proliferate and consumers are becoming extremely savvy about working different channels—mobile, online and in store. These marketplace and consumer developments have significant impacts on retailers' IT capabilities and their applications in particular. To address these challenges, we recommend three strategies:

Liquid Applications
To compete with agility and speed, companies can no longer focus only on complex, lengthy and expensive coding of applications, or monolithic systems built from the ground up. What's needed is a new way to build software—one that is faster, flexible and more liquid.

Intelligent Applications
To manage growing volume, velocity and complexity, and to maximize the business value of internal and external data, companies need to embed software intelligence everywhere.

Connected Applications
Connectivity in the age of the software-driven business is about more than application integration. It's about creating new competitive frontiers using software. To grow revenue and defend their market position, businesses must open new dimensions of application connectivity.

Over the past decade, we've seen a steady state of disruptive technologies, driven by advances in mobile computing, social media and cloud-based services. Retailers must be able to spot the next disruption before it's too late.

While the IoT may seem like science fiction, it is becoming reality faster than most of us can comprehend. Retailers that take the lead in this space stand to gain an important advantage in an already competitive environment.

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